The Rabid Brigadier

by Craig Sargent

  CHAPTER

  Two

  IF DOGS can pray then this one was praying with all the fervor of its canine heart, praying a message of supreme thanks that Martin Stone was walking toward it from out of the mist-shrouded forests. The bull terrier had begun to think that he was never coming back, that he was gone, or dead. It had greedily eaten all its food and water within the first few hours of his departure. Subsequently it had had nothing for days while it stayed hidden in the thick bush where Stone had left it and the Harley. But now he was here. It would drink. It would eat.

  Its eyes grew big as creampuffs and it whined out a shrill childlike screech as its muscular white body trembled wildly. Suddenly, as if unable to contain its enthusiasm, the bull terrier jumped high in the air, twisting around in a corkscrew motion like a dolphin spinning in water. Stone couldn’t help but laugh and grabbed the dog around the collar, pulling it toward him so it slammed into his chest, bounced off him, hit the ground and then shot right back up again like a cue ball looking for a game of billiards. It put its paws on his chest and sniffed him with a strange expression. Stone looked down and saw that he was covered from just below the neck to mid-thigh with blood and specks of purple flesh. The dog sniffed hard again and then jumped down to the ground in disgust. Good, Stone thought. Excaliber wouldn’t lick human blood. He didn’t want it to ever acquire a taste for homo sapiens or a hell of a lot of people would be missing tails, and other things. But the bull terrier was smart; it knew that mankind was too bitter a steak to chew.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Master is back.” The dog whined greedily, its nose aiming up toward the canteen on his waist. Stone took it off and the fighting dog let its huge tongue slap out of its mouth several times in restless anticipation. Stone reached down and poured a stream of the cool liquid into the animal’s empty bowl. Its face hit the stuff with a splash and it began lapping away madly so that only about half the water actually made it into its throat. But it was the idea that counted, and it looked up happily after about a minute of machinelike licking.

  Stone grunted hard as he lifted the huge Harley 1200cc Electraglide from its side, hidden in the center of a doughnut of thick shrubs. It was hard going pushing the mobile battle-wagon through the wooden tendrils that grabbed everywhere with thorny fingers. But after about five minutes he pulled it free, out onto a deer path, and mounted up.

  “Come on, dog. We gotta get out of here before some of my recent acquaintances come looking for more action.” Stone patted the thick leather seat behind him on the purring bike and Excaliber looked over from where he was sniffing a dark, fungi-covered wet log, nosing around for black beetles. Suddenly the pitbull found one and snapped it into his jaws. He crunched hard, popping the armor shell like a peanut, and swallowed it with a look of gourmet delight. Then he turned and ran, reaching the Harley in two quick strides. Without breaking step the bull terrier jumped and landed smoothly on the back, gripping its front and back legs around the sides of the seat like a starfish wrapped around a clam. Stone looked down at his hand. It was throbbing painfully, the top of it red and swelling already. The teethmarks of Ear’s few molars were clear on the flesh. It was infected with that slime’s mucus. God only knew what kind of diseases Stone was going to get now.

  He reached around behind him on the bike into the medical box, quickly took out and rubbed on Ampicillin and Tetracycline Salve over the wound and then popped down some pills of the same. His father had prepared, among many things, a number of combat-usable ointments and medicines—just a few tricks he had picked up in his twenty years fighting in Southeast Asia and Latin America. How it would work against human saliva was another question.

  Stone pulled back the accelerator on the handlebar and the bike picked up speed along an ice and snow patched road that headed quickly up into the lower slopes of the Uinta Mountains, Utah. Dr. Kennedy, the double-talking, snake oil salesman extraordinaire who had helped get him into the now decimated Last Resort, had also been able to get out with Stone’s sister April just minutes before Stone sent the place into a smoking hell. He trusted the man with his life. Kennedy must have run into trouble, and had to split fast. There had been enough guards after them all back there. He wouldn’t let himself think for even one second that they hadn’t made it. No way. No fucking way. But where would he have headed?

  Stone slowed as the bike approached a steep road that angled sharply up and around in a long twisting motion, up the side of a towering mountain. The night seemed to grow darker by the minute as thick rolling storm clouds filled the heavens above, a churning sea of mile-wide fists that threatened to pummel the earth at any moment. Rangely—that was it. Kennedy had mentioned that he used Rangely for his base in this part of the country. A place where he had friends—people who would hide him. It was about sixty miles to the east, which Stone knew would be closer to one hundred and twenty or more through these twisted mountains and valleys. He exhaled a breath of deep weariness and sped up slightly as the dog barked for a second, as if feeling his master’s anxieties.

  Stone rode through the night seeming to ascend forever into the mountains, into the very heavens, which twisted in a sea of black that and felt like just yards above his head. The moisture condensed down from above in sheets of gray, filling the slopes with a thick cold mist that coated him and the dog with a cloak of liquid. Even with the deep grooved tires of the Harley, Stone had to take it easy on the ice-sheened one-lane road, the edge of which dropped thousands of feet to a chasm of rock-hard teeth ready to smash anything that came hurtling down into pudding. The bike’s headlight burnt a dim hole through the icy fog, just enough for Stone to edge on into the darkness.

  At last they reached the peak. Though he couldn’t see it, Stone could feel the ground level off fairly rapidly, go on for about two hundred feet then start down again. Moving slow as a turtle, Stone eased the big bike down the far slope, absurdly slow for a machine of that size and capability. But if they went over the edge, it wouldn’t be anything but twisted junk. And so its power was reined in as Stone kept both feet on the icy road, just sliding along down the side.

  Suddenly he sucked in, a breath of awe. For they had dropped instantly out of the cloud level. And below, as far as the eye could see, was a fairyland of hills and streams, low valleys and darkly colored geometric shapes of fields and small towns. The moon sliced through the cloud cover several miles off, sending down a stream of white beams that lit the terrain with a brilliant merciless light. He felt for a split second as if he could see all the world, melting into weaving shadows at the end of the horizon.

  Another wave of weariness swept over him. And this time he could hardly fight it. His knees felt like they were about to buckle beneath him. His body hurt bad from the force of the explosion the day before. He had been trying to deny it, but some of his joints felt as if they could hardly move anymore. He had to rest, to eat. He hadn’t eaten for days. He saw a sudden outcrop that came right out of the mountainside—a plateau several hundred yards wide with a band of dense shrubs covering the edge, creating a natural windbreak. Stone pulled the bike off the road and across the wide ledge to the far side, away and unseen from the road. He turned the engine off and the night was suddenly eerily quiet.

  He stepped off the bike and the autorest popped out from the side, letting the bike sink onto its wide metal foot. Stone pulled out a tarp from one of many black alloy cases that were fitted in racks around the back. Pulling out two collapsible tent poles, he quickly erected what would pass for a small lean-to and then pulled down the flaps on both sides so that they and the entire bike were virtually enclosed. Already it seemed a little warmer, with the ice-edged night air held at bay by the ripstop nylon walls. The pitbull awoke suddenly from where it had been sleeping on and off on the back seat and sat up, staring at Stone from the top of the Harley.

  “After the work’s done the wonderdog awakens. As usual,” Stone said, giving a halfhearted evil eye to the canine, which yawned so wide that Stone was sure the a
nimal’s jawbone would Snap apart at the seams. But the sharklike jaws clamped loudly shut again and the dog looked at Stone with its inscrutable almond eyes, and whined intently. “Well, you woke too soon, pal. The work’s not all done.” Stone opened one of the survival cases stacked on the back of the bike and took out a small stove. He turned a knob and the gas heater/stove lit instantly, sending out a reassuring wave of heat through the makeshift shelter. Placing it on the ground, Stone warmed his hands over it for a minute, trying to get his joints and knuckles a little bit looser. He washed them in the heat, rubbing the hands from palms out, down the fingers, trying to shake off the pain and injury.

  Opening a long rectangular box in the lower part of the rack system, Stone extracted the stock of a .30 caliber marksman’s rifle. He took the various broken-down pieces from their hard foam beds and fitted the entire long range rifle system together in a couple of minutes. Then the sighting system—infrared—was screwed onto the top of the weapon’s ring system. It had been designed originally to kill Russians, but it would kill everything else just as well.

  “Come on, dog,” Stone said, pulling the flap aside. “Those who work, eat; those who don’t, starve. Or haven’t you read your Karl Marx today?” The fighting animal followed right along at his heels, knowing instinctively that nutrition was involved. Stone walked about fifteen yards to a rock overhang that looked out across the mountain plateau and onto groves of trees growing up from the slopes that surrounded it. He rested himself on his stomach and elbows, got the dog quieted down and still beside him, and sighted up through the telescopic view on top. He flicked a small black switch and the power unit of the infrared detector hummed on. The whole world came to life in a bizarre pattern of red and orange dancing waves of light. He saw things by their heat patterns now, the birds breathing hard in the trees, owls, and rodents along the ground. With the cool air around them, the heat of living matter seemed to burn like little red suns against the cold blue background.

  There—movement. A jackrabbit. Stone followed it as it hopped madly across an open space and he eased his finger down on the trigger. The autosilencer built into the muzzle released a harsh hiss as the .30 caliber slug spun free and through the night air. In a fraction of a second it tore into the rabbit, sending it flying in a heap of spinning fur up into the sky like something aiming for space flight. Then it came down again hard in a reddish-looking heap and didn’t move.

  “Go!” Stone commanded, pointing at the downed prey. He stared over at the pitbull, which stared back. “Fetch, get that fucking rabbit—that’s dinner! Go! Go!” Stone commanded it in his most stern tones, but the pitbull just looked at him as if he was crazy. Then it sniffed the air coming from the dead animal and came up on all fours. The ninety-pound satchel of steel grace leapt six feet from the ledge they were on and began running at full speed across the open field. Stone Watched the heat blur of the dog as it moved like a panther toward the fading orange glow of the rabbit. Excaliber picked up the cottontail and set it carefully beneath his canines, hardly pressing down at all, and took off again back toward Stone. He came to a skidding halt before the rock and, resting on his haunches, the bull terrier launched itself back up onto the rock ledge. Its front paws made it but its back ones didn’t and they clawed frantically against the rock with a horrible kind of scratching sound that a fingernail makes when scraped on a blackboard. Stone reached down and grabbed hold of the flailing animal around the chest and pulled it up with a heave.

  “Good boy,” Stone said when the dog was at last planted on terra firma again. The pitbull dropped the prey at his feet. It was a monster of a rabbit, as big as he’d ever seen—what was left of it. For the .30 caliber slug had taken its head clean off. But what was left was plenty. Even for the two of them.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  WHEN STONE stepped outside the tarp the next morning the sky was still black as night and churning with a malevolent fury. He wouldn’t have known it was daytime but for the dim ashen face of the sun straight off on the horizon, barely able to burn its shape through the ceiling of clouds. Something was in the offing, something bad. The bull terrier trotted out next to him, took one look, turned and walked back inside.

  “Yeah, you got the right idea,” Stone muttered as he spat a thick gob of sleep-collected phlegm onto the snow-speckled ground. “Unfortunately, we got promises to keep.” He pulled the tarp down and folded it up, stowing it in back of the Harley. Excaliber, lying contentedly next to the front wheel of the bike, was suddenly exposed to the cold biting wind that seemed to sweep across the slope as if bidding them good morning. He stood up, looked at Stone with nasty eyes and then shook his whole body, sending a wave of warm blood coursing through his veins. The pitbull stretched forward and back, pulling his legs as far as they would go in each direction in some canine version of yoga and then jumped up to the back seat where he waited mouth open, drool slobbering down onto the leather.

  Stone started up the buffalo-sized Harley. He put the motorcycle in gear and headed across the plateau, then back out onto the mountain road, if it could be called that. It had been five years since America had for all intents and purposes stopped being a society and started falling toward the barbarism that was the new “civilization.” The roads were the first to go, cracked, asphalt bubbling up like stew cooked too long on the stove of the eternal sun. He was glad he had the Harley. Any kind of four-wheel vehicle would have found the going virtually impossible.

  With the thick mist gone on the lower slopes of the mountain Stone was able to open up full throttle once he felt fully awake. He still felt strange, though. The hand where he had been bitten was swollen with a huge boil now. But though he could feel it he wouldn’t look at it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it, so he chose to ignore it, hoping that whatever was going on in there would go away. But it hurt like the blazes, throbbing beneath the skin as if something was alive in there, something diseased and growing.

  They hit the bottom of the mountain after about an hour and a long plain spread out ahead flat as a pane of glass, and at the far end, perhaps twenty miles off, another range of mountains rose out of the brown earth like granite arms reaching for the sky. He stopped the Harley at the very edge of the flatlands and rested his feet on the ground, staring up hard at the heavens. It was getting worse up there, not better. The sky seemed to be alive, filled with churning clouds, like a pit of black serpents all writhing and sliding among one another. The air was so thick with moisture he felt he could open his mouth and drink. Yet the rains didn’t fall. It was as if the clouds were holding it all back, wanting to fill the creatures below with fear and trembling, wanting to eke every ounce of apprehension from the life forms that inhabited the prairie before they actually released their torrents. Stone debated for several minutes whether to go on. If he got caught out there and it came, there could be flash floods, sheets of water driving across the plain like a tidal wave. But he couldn’t wait. In the new America, there was no waiting—for anything. The slow were lost, died, eaten, whatever. If nothing else, Stone knew that one fact beyond all else. The new world was not a place for the indecisive.

  He pulled back on the accelerator and tore onto the flat, fissured terrain without glancing back. Within minutes they were cruising along the hard-packed flats at a good 60mph. Excaliber tried to do his usual deep sleep routine but the bull terrier sensed the danger above and its eyes kept popping open to glance upward at the sky. At last the animal sat up, back legs still wrapped for dear life around the seat, front legs extended up so it was sort of half standing, leaning against Stone’s back, and stared dead ahead at the rushing landscape.

  For a wasteland the countryside was amazingly filled with life. Animals seemed to whiz by them, browsing among the snow-jeweled vegetation, trying to get what nourishment they could from the winter terrain. Bison, deer, moles, lizards all jerked and ran away from the roar of the bike, stopping some yards off when they saw it meant them no harm. Then they re
turned to their search with radar eyes for anything edible. Excaliber let out an occasional bark or two as he spotted some furry creature or other scampering off, but it was obviously more of a friendly morning greeting than a threat to leap from the bike and into the fray. It was other dogs that seemed to get his goat, as if he had to show them just who was boss. But for the moment anyway, there was nothing out there doglike enough to get the English pitbull’s juices flowing.

  They had gone for about an hour when Stone noticed a large shape ahead of them, about thirty yards to the right. It piqued his curiosity, since it seemed to be the skeleton of a quite immense animal, rib bones poking through a coating of sand and coarsely textured red stone. He stopped the Harley, stepped off and walked over to the object, the pitbull jumping around his heels as it took full advantage of the momentary stop to get some blood going through its cramped muscles. Stone whistled as he made a full circumference of the long dead creature. It was huge. No way it could be a bison, even a mutant one. The rib cage of the thing looked like it could have held a small car. The head, half submerged in the ground, was covered with several inches of coagulated mud, and Stone whipped out his foot, kicking the substance free. His eyes opened even wider—it was a dinosaur. A triceratops if his high school memories of biology class were accurate. That huge armored head and triple horns were unmistakable. This thing hadn’t been dead a few months—more like one hundred million years. Suddenly he realized that he must be in a section of the Dinosaur National Park, in eastern Utah—where archaeologists had been digging up dinosaur bones for decades.